Capsule summary: it's continuing to do very, very good things for me, and I'm continuing to love it.

The monkey and I have had a couple more sessions at the Egoscue Clinic in SF since the last time I posted (would have had a session yesterday, but my work schedule interfered). Our therapist (AB) has been seeing visible progress, which is good, but what's even better is how much progress I'm feeling:

Pain level, down.

Energy level, up.

Mood, up.

Endurance, up.

Balance, up.

Height, up. (Srsly, I'm at least 1/2" taller just from not being all torqued out of alignment.)

Plans for the future and belief in my ability to work towards them, up.

I've been diligently doing my E-cises every day. At one of my earlier visits, AB said "So, how's it going? How are the exercises?"

"Great!" I said. "I've been doing them every morning, and sometimes in the evening after I get home."

"Oh!" she said, in a surprised tone. "Why twice?"

"Because it feels good," I said. "Because I can feel it making a difference, and I want to speed that up."

"Oh... okay, given that, I'm going to revise what I had planned for you just a bit."

The impression I get is that a lot of their clients are resistant to doing the exercises every day, and that when AB realized I'm not one of those, she bumped up the effort level on my menus to help move things along more quickly.

I'm continuing to do them twice a day, for the same reason. It's easy to tell which ones I most need at any particular time — they're the ones I hate most. Right now I'm really hating the modified counter stretch, but I'm not hating the crocodile or static extension exercises nearly as much.

My pain level has dropped markedly. I'm still not moving entirely freely, and if I bend over too swiftly, I usually wind up freezing for a moment as I mutter "yeeeowch!" But if I really consider it, the sensations are no longer what I'd really call pain and are now more in the realm of discomfort. The points of discomfort in my lower back and leg feel like they're not responding as readily to the E-cises, so in the last couple of days I've begun using the foamroller for some trigger point therapy.

Was it dottie_dear who said that foam roller work is usually accompanied by cursing like a sailor? Or was that from something else I read? Anyway, it's true. Yowch. Yeeeowch. OW!!!!!

But afterwards... ahhhhh.

I've been noticing that my recovery and progress is not a straight line. It seems to go in cycles of "improvement; improvement; improvement; ow, this feels like a setback, maybe I did too much; BIG improvement; improvement."

I think I'll be able to pick up a (small) kettlebell and start doing rolling squats soon. I'm forcing myself to wait longer than I want to, and longer than may be entirely necessary. But I really don't want to hit one of the dips in the cycle and have to wonder "is this a normal dip, or did I overdo it with the kettlebell?"

You know what I want to do? I want to learn to turn cartwheels. I want to learn to do a diving somersault. I want to learn to walk on my hands. I want to be able to do a handstand. These are all things I didn't learn because I was too much of a geeky, uncoordinated outsider while growing up and so missed out on a lot of the things that girls do in groups. (I also have almost no experience with jumping rope or playing jacks, for the same reason.)

Thank you, Pete Egoscue. I'm having ideas about things I never thought were possible before.